Craddick’s smartphone & driving bill an exercise in feel-goodism

Robert Pratt photo Copyright Pratt on Texas

Robert Pratt

Monday was the first day to file bills for the upcoming session of the Texas Legislature and our old friend from Midland was there to once again file his feel-good bill on texting while driving.

This year however, Representative Tom Craddick has changed the language to “smartphone use while driving.”

Sounding like a teenager’s plea that everyone else does it or has it, the former Speaker of the House said:

“Ninety-eight cities in Texas have an ordinance governing the use of smartphones while driving, and 46 states, D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam and the U.S. Virgin islands have a law governing the use of smartphones while driving.”

So what? What does the number of jurisdictions which have heavy regulation have to do with whether or not Texas takes action?

Frankly, this is the argument of the liberal activist perpetually stuck in adolescence who is afraid of being different.

More ridiculous is the inference in Craddick’s claim that if his regulatory bill passed, “zero Texans” would die. Yes, he said he filed the bill because “there should be zero deaths.”

Such generate a lot of money for government in fines but, like speed limits, don’t actually change driver behavior significantly.

Again this sounds like the liberal who believes passing a law stops behavior. I think no one should die of murder but even with many laws and the death penalty, it still happens rather regularly.

The thing Craddick and other feel-gooders miss on this issue is that with all of these large sample sizes to study, no respected, honest scientific study has shown that bans on cell phone use while driving make any significant difference in safety.

Such bans generate a lot of money for government in fines but, like speed limits, don’t actually change driver behavior significantly.

[For more, see: http://thenewspaper.com/news/44/4464.asp]

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Comments

  1. Every place I’ve ever been has some sort of law against impaired driving, I don’t know why this isn’t covered by that. The thing I would like to see is our representitives doing away with bad laws instead of trying to create new ones. If they done that I don’t think re-election would be as much of a problem.

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